Moz/FF

In the spring and summer of 2016 the Connected Devices team dug deeper into opportunities for Firefox OS. They concluded that Firefox OS TV was a project to be run by our commercial partner and not a project to be led by Mozilla. Further, Firefox OS was determined to not be sufficiently useful for ongoing Connected Devices work to justify the effort to maintain it. This meant that development of the Firefox OS stack was no longer a part of Connected Devices, or Mozilla at all. Firefox OS 2.6 would be the last release from Mozilla. Today we are announcing the next phase in that evolution. While work at Mozilla on Firefox OS has ceased, we very much need to continue to evolve the underlying code that comprises Gecko, our web platform engine, as part of the ongoing development of Firefox. In order to evolve quickly and enable substantial new architectural changes in Gecko, Mozilla’s Platform Engineering organization needs to remove all B2G-related code from mozilla-central. This certainly has consequences for B2G OS. For the community to continue working on B2G OS they will have to maintain a code base that includes a full version of Gecko, so will need to fork Gecko and proceed with development on their own, separate branch.

Software companies are one by one giving up on Windows XP support for their products, and now it appears that it’s Mozilla’s turn to switch the focus to newer versions of Windows.

Firefox 53 will be the first version of the browser which will no longer support Windows XP and Windows Vista, so users who haven’t yet upgraded to Windows 7 or newer will have to either stick with Firefox 52 or move to a different browser.

At the end of 2015 Mozilla effectively put an end to Firefox OS / Boot 2 Gecko by concluding things weren't working out for Mozilla Corp and their commercial partners to ship Firefox OS smartphones. All commercial development around it has since stopped and they are now preparing to strip B2G from the mozilla-central code-base.

The news to report on now is that Ari Jaaksi and David Bryant have announced, "Today we are announcing the next phase in that evolution. While work at Mozilla on Firefox OS has ceased, we very much need to continue to evolve the underlying code that comprises Gecko, our web platform engine, as part of the ongoing development of Firefox. In order to evolve quickly and enable substantial new architectural changes in Gecko, Mozilla’s Platform Engineering organization needs to remove all B2G-related code from mozilla-central. This certainly has consequences for B2G OS. For the community to continue working on B2G OS they will have to maintain a code base that includes a full version of Gecko, so will need to fork Gecko and proceed with development on their own, separate branch."

Today, September 22, 2016, Chris Coulson from Canonical published two security advisories to inform the Ubuntu Linux community about the availability of the latest Mozilla products in all supported releases.

In October 2014, as part of the Firefox 34 beta release, Mozilla introduced its Firefox Hello communications technology enabling users to make calls directly from the browser. On Sept. 20, 2016, Mozilla formally removed support for Firefox Hello as part of the new Firefox 49 release.

The Mozilla Bugzilla entry for the removal of Firefox Hello provides little insight as to why the communications feature is being pulled from the open-source browser. As it turns out, the Firefox Hello removal is related to shifting priorities at Mozilla.

Mozilla has released Firefox 49 for Windows, Mac and Linux. The latest update to the popular open-source web browser introduces a range of (always) welcome improvements. Among them, Firefox 49 ships with native support for the Widevine CDM on Linux. This enables you to watch Netflix (and other DRM-protected HTML5 video content) without any cumbersome workarounds.

Mozilla is trying a rebranding. Back in June, the browser developer announced that it would freshen up its logo and enlist the Internet's help in reaching a final decision. The company hired British design company Johnson Banks to come up with seven new "concepts" to illustrate the company's work, as shown in the gallery above.

The logos rely on vibrant colors, and several of them recall '80s and '90s style. In pure, nearly-unintelligible marketing speak, Mozilla writes that each new design reflects a story about the company. "From paying homage to our paleotechnic origins to rendering us as part of an ever-expanding digital ecosystem, from highlighting our global community ethos to giving us a lift from the quotidian elevator open button, the concepts express ideas about Mozilla in clever and unexpected ways" Mozilla's Creative Director Tim Murray writes in a blog post.

Mozilla is soliciting comment and criticism on the seven new designs for the next two weeks, but this is no Boaty McBoatface situation. Mozilla is clear that it's not crowdsourcing a design, asking anyone to work on spec, or holding a vote over which logo the Internet prefers. It's just asking for comments.

The Linux version of Firefox 49 is due for a proper release in September, although preview versions are currently available for those who want to try it out. With Widevine being free for anyone to use, Firefox's adoption of plugin-free support for it could well mean that the standard is embraced by a larger number of sites. Support for DRM makes the protocol particularly appealing to content providers, as does the lack of license fee.

A few moments ago, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman had the pleasure of announcing the general availability of the Linux kernel 4.8.13 and Linux kernel 4.4.37 LTS maintenance updates.
While many rolling GNU/Linux distributions have just received the Linux 4.8.12 kernel, it looks like Linux kernel 4.8.13 is now available with more improvements and bug fixes, but it's not a major milestone. According to the appended shortlog and the diff since last week's Linux 4.8.12 kernel release, a total of 46 files were changed, with 214 insertions and 95 deletions.

openSUSE's Douglas DeMaio reports on the latest Open Source and GNU/Linux technologies that landed in the repositories of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.

What Is A VPN Connection? Why To Use VPN?

We all have heard about VPN sometime. Most of us normal users of internet use it. To bypass the region based restrictions of services like Netflix or Youtube ( Yes, youtube has geo- restrictions too). In fact, VPN is actually mostly used for this purpose only. ​

The Libreboot C201 from Minifree is really really really ridiculously open source

Open source laptops – ones not running any commercial software whatsoever – have been the holy grail for free software fans for years. Now, with the introduction of libreboot, a truly open source boot firmware, the dream is close to fruition.
The $730 laptop is a bog standard piece of hardware but it contains only open source software. The OS, Debian, is completely open source and to avoid closed software the company has added an Atheros Wi-Fi dongle with open source drivers rather than use the built-in Wi-Fi chip.